Manufacturing in the cloud: users, consumers and systems

With
the advent of cloud computing comes the possibility of developing
'manufacturing as a service.' David Golightly and Sarah Sharples discuss
the ergonomics implications of being able to 'pay as you go' for
products.

Production and assembly is set to evolve with
the emergence of cloud manufacturing. Cloud manufacturing moves beyond
simply using cloud computing in the manufacturing context, by applying
cloud concepts to enable highly configurable, on-demand ‘manufacturing
as a service’. Through the use of automation, rapidly-configurable
manufacturing lines and automated supply chain orchestration, a single
manufacturing resource can be requested by multiple customers, and
reconfigured to meet different consumer needs on a pay-as-you-go basis.
This new paradigm aims to provide heightened levels of quality and value
for consumers of manufacturing, and allows manufacturing service
providers to engage in new, flexible arrangements leading to better use
of capabilities.

Changes across the manufacturing supply chain
will have implications for customers, managers and front-line operators.
While the relevance of factors such as trust and the importance of HCI
are highlighted as areas for research within cloud manufacturing they
are not, as yet, presented within a coherent agenda for investigation
and change. There are also other potential considerations such as new
requirements for operator knowledge within rapidly changing assembly
lines. These are concerns that ergonomics is centrally placed to
address.

Here, we present our early impressions of the relevance
of ergonomics to the manufacturing cloud from our involvement in the
EPSRC-funded Cloud Manufacturing Project based at the University of
Nottingham. Work to date has involved consultation and requirements
gathering with consumers of the manufacturing cloud, either as
traditional Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or as smaller,
‘cottage’ users. We have also involved the people who will underpin the
manufacturing cloud - IT providers, manufacturing service providers and
logistics providers.

Consuming the manufacturing cloud
First, we have consumers of cloud manufacturing services – the people
who request manufacturing services and components. The flexibility of
cloud manufacturing means that where manufacturing services may
previously have been too expensive, they can now be booked on a
short-term basis, opening up manufacturing to a whole range of new
users, including ‘cottage’ manufacturers and crowd-funding ventures.
Already, we have seen a diversity of opinions on how people perceive the
use of the cloud, what it means to them, and therefore what knowledge
or mental models may need support. For example, while cottage users see
potential in the cloud, they have rarely considered the technical and
procedural requirements, such as expressing product designs through open
standards, that OEMs foresee.

The opportunity to rapidly and
cheaply procure early products from the cloud offers the potential for
rapid prototyping and experimentation, and this is a potential benefit
to user-centred design and evaluation for new products. However, with
this new agility of development comes a risk that ergonomics and
end-user participation could be missed in the process. Therefore,
ergonomists need to find ways of being represented within the cloud
manufacturing lifecycle. An area for interest in ergonomics has been the
expression and capture of affective requirements to support mass
customisation to users’ personal needs. Consumers cite the flexibility
of the cloud as an opportunity to customise products to specific
requirements. In meeting this need, ergonomics should continue to
explore techniques that aim to capture and express affective needs in a
formalised manner, such as Kansei engineering.

Servicing the manufacturing cloud
At the other end of the supply chain, we have the manufacturing service
providers. Principally, these are the people providing machining,
component build, assembly and so on. The vision is these organisations
will use a greater degree of automation and robotics than ever before,
allowing them to flexibly adapt production to new orders as they come
in. The challenge for ergonomics is to understand how to support control
of these production environments, particularly where the introduction
of technologies such as swarm intelligence for evolvable assembly may be
beyond the interpretation of people who are expected to confirm the
performance of automation. Similarly, visions of the factory floor
discussing wholly automated scheduling, though, in practice, people
still play a key role in translating a whole host of local factors into
constraints for successful operations.

It is interesting that
while many academic conceptions of cloud manufacturing take the view
that it is primarily an automated process applied to ‘green field’
sites, our industrial partners are as interested in strategies for
human-cyber integration, and emphasise the importance of integration
with legacy equipment and processes. These are areas where ergonomics
and HCI can play a central role. Also, the variability of products will
require broader ranges of skill and flexibility from operators on the
shop floor. Ergonomics can help with successful, user-centred deployment
of new technology within existing production and with walking the line
between variability leading to stimulation and job enrichment, or
complexity and overload.

Orchestrating the manufacturing cloud
Matching consumers to services is a technical and an organisation
challenge and both challenges have an ergonomics dimension. The
technical orchestration of temporary supply chains requires consumers to
express their needs in a standardised form, while service providers
express capabilities in a formalised manner. While some of this
information, such as CAD data, lends itself readily to quantification
and codification, building a supply chain is more than just
orchestrating product requirements. Partners in a commercial arrangement
need to establish trust, including processes for managing communication
and risk. The notion of a social network of companies, where people
select and configure new supply chains, is dependent on knowing how to
capture and express attributes such as skill, reliability and knowledge,
as much as technical capability. Effective implementation of decision
support for supply chain management will also rely on determining the
boundaries of technology, and how human decision-making and contact can
be supported, rather than sidelined.

This highlights the most
common concern raised in our requirements work so far: security. Not
just technical security, but also around issues of intellectual
property. Even if technically secure, people have to trust the
technology and each other. The role of ergonomics here is two-fold.
First, in making sure that processes are clear, relevant and understood
by all and second, in ensuring human-machine interfaces clearly
communicate the provenance of incoming data, and the destination of
outgoing data.

The role for ergonomics
We
have highlighted just a few of the issues coming to light as we consider
work in this new manufacturing environment. Commentators on cloud
manufacturing note that many of the technical ideas are not new. The
innovation comes from the integration of developments to make a complex,
distributed manufacturing system. Similarly, much of the ergonomics
that will apply will not be new, but it will require us to orchestrate
different fields, such as affective requirements, models of
collaboration, cyber-human interaction and physical ergonomics for
assembly in new ways.

This is a complex task, and requires a view
of ergonomics on cloud manufacturing that takes a holistic view, either
through addressing layers of users across a product lifecycle, as we
have done here, or through systems approaches such as cognitive work
analysis. Integrating ergonomics in the manufacturing cloud gives us an
opportunity to explore the link between micro ergonomics, be that local
processes of automation control and scheduling, or understanding
transferrable assembly skills and macro ergonomics, in terms of the
overall performance of the manufacturing cloud. It will also provide the
opportunity to demonstrate the value of ergonomics in the process of
building and operating a manufacturing cloud.

The ultimate vision
of cloud manufacturing is that any relevant service is decentralised and
available through orchestration. This vision applies to ergonomists,
too. For us to keep our presence in the manufacturing lifecycle, we will
need to adapt, delivering ergonomics as a service through the cloud, so
that we can continue to influence the design of products, and of
productive manufacturing work.

By David Golightly & Sarah Sharples

David
Golightly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham,
working on the human factors contribution to the Cloud Manufacturing
project. Sarah Sharples is Professor of Human Factors at the University
of Nottingham, and Co-Investigator on the Cloud Manufacturing project.

This article first appeared in issue 531 of The Ergonomist, September 2014